Maven: The Definitive Guide

Common Lifecycle Goals

Many of the packaging lifecycles have similar goals. If you look at the goals bound to the WAR and JAR lifecycles, you’ll see that they differ only in the package phase. The package phase of the WAR lifecycle calls war:war and the package phase of the JAR lifecycle calls jar:jar. Most of the lifecycles you will come into contact with share some common lifecycle goals for managing resources, running tests, and compiling source code. In this section, we’ll explore some of these common lifecycle goals in detail.

Process Resources

Most lifecycles bind the resources:resources goal to the process-resources phase. The process-resources phase “processes” resources and copies them to the output directory. If you haven’t customized the default directory locations defined in the Super POM, this means that Maven will copy the files from ${basedir}/src/main/resources to ${basedir}/target/classes or the directory defined in ${project.build.outputDirectory}. In addition to copying the resources to the output directory, Maven can also apply a filter to the resources that allows you to replace tokens within resource file. Just as variables are referenced in a POM using ${...} notation, you can reference variables in your project’s resources using the same syntax. Coupled with build profiles, such a facility can be used to produce build artifacts that target different deployment platforms. This is something that is common in environments that need to produce output ...